Hedge Funds Are Dumping Agrium Inc. (USA) (AGU)

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Before we spend many hours researching a company, we’d like to analyze what hedge funds and billionaire investors think of the stock first. We would like to do so because the successful investors’ consensus returns have been exceptional. The top 30 mid-cap stocks among the best performing hedge funds in our database yielded an average return of 18% during the last 12 months, outperforming the S&P 500 Index funds by double digits. Although the successful funds occasionally have their duds, such as SunEdison and Valeant, the hedge fund picks seem to work on average. In the following paragraphs, we find out what the billionaire investors and hedge funds think of Agrium Inc. (USA) (NYSE:AGU) .

Is Agrium Inc. (USA) (NYSE:AGU) a buy, sell, or hold? Hedge funds are actually taking a pessimistic view. The number of bullish hedge fund positions that are disclosed in regulatory 13F filings retreated by 1 in recent months. AGU was in 17 hedge funds’ portfolios at the end of the third quarter of 2016. There were 18 hedge funds in our database with AGU positions at the end of the previous quarter. The level and the change in hedge fund popularity aren’t the only variables you need to analyze to decipher hedge funds’ perspectives. A stock may witness a boost in popularity but it may still be less popular than similarly priced stocks. That’s why at the end of this article we will examine companies such as Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ:CTXS), Grupo Financero Sntdr Mxco SAB de CV ADR (NYSE:BSMX), and Cincinnati Financial Corporation (NASDAQ:CINF) to gather more data points.

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Hedge fund activity in Agrium Inc. (USA) (NYSE:AGU)

At the end of third quarter, a total of 17 of the hedge funds tracked by Insider Monkey held long positions in this stock, a drop of 6% from the second quarter of 2016, as hedge fund ownership falls further. The graph below displays the number of hedge funds with bullish positions in AGU over the last 5 quarters. With the smart money’s sentiment swirling, there exists a select group of noteworthy hedge fund managers who were upping their holdings significantly (or already accumulated large positions).

HedgeFundSentimentChart

According to Insider Monkey’s hedge fund database, Peter Rathjens, Bruce Clarke and John Campbell’s Arrowstreet Capital has the biggest position in Agrium Inc. (USA) (NYSE:AGU), worth close to $80.7 million. The second most bullish fund manager is Daniel Bubis of Tetrem Capital Management, with a $62.2 million position; the fund has 2.3% of its 13F portfolio invested in the stock. Other peers that are bullish encompass Howard Guberman’s Gruss Asset Management, Sander Gerber’s Hudson Bay Capital Management, and John Overdeck and David Siegel’s Two Sigma Advisors. We should note that Hudson Bay Capital Management is among our list of the 100 best performing hedge funds which is based on the performance of their 13F long positions in non-microcap stocks.

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